Gemini Ultra will, in developer mode, have 1 million token context length so that would fit a medium book at least. No word on what it will support in production mode though.
By now, everyone in the world knows that American tipping culture is getting out of hand. That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce another way of “supporting” creators. Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, shared his desire to tip developers of especially enjoyable games....
Rich coming from someone who made a name for himself as the president of the nickel and dime company…
The problem really is, like in most industries to be fair, that the actual creators get far too little of the figurative monetary cake.
And if we ever see tipping in games, god forbid, then that money will at best get shared by everyone so there would need to be millions in tipping before it is even noticeable for an individual developer in a normal AAA team.
+1 for Genshin. While I think your gacha warning is excellent I do want to point out that the amount of resources you get for getting characters is more than enough to clear all story content. Hell if you’re a good player you could probably clear the whole game without using a single primogem, not even the countless thousands you get along the way.
And massive is also the understatement of the year. There is voiced content here that dwarfs even whole trilogies. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more recorded lines than all of Dragon Age and Mass Effect put together. And the story is likely not even at the halfway point yet, there’s still years to go. Closest analogy would probably be SWTOR, the MMO, but with much better combat.
Recently stumbled upon this note-taking app called SiYuan, but it honestly looks a bit too good to be true(?). Has anyone here used it or got any experience with it? Trying to replace Obsidian is a difficult task, and I’ve been through almost all note-taking apps there are out there, however this one looks fairly similar....
“Does not support desktop and mobile application connections, only supports use on browsers”
Regarding Docker deployment. It’s unclear if the application package for Linux supports usage together with the apps because that is a needed feature for me, to have everything centrally stored but easily edited via phone, and from experience the browser experience tends to be rather miserable.
I’ll for sure test it out when I have the time though, looks pretty feature complete if a bit overboard for just note-taking. This is not OneNote, this is more like Confluence.
My dream is something that can handle both seamlessly, I want to both take quick notes and have them easily searchable and indexed automatically while also supporting structuring knowledge in pages and sub-pages with rich content support.
The best approach in my opinion was in Mass Effect.
Dragon Age a close second but there it’s much more subtle and good/evil not really a part of it, it’s more internal to you the why behind your characters actions. Stuff like using blood magic which is illegal but very powerful can be used from a perspective of “the greater good” or you could roleplay that decision as a lust for power. Which factions you side with for sure has morality attached but since all roads lead to saving the world its much more about your own reasons to judge if your character is evil or just focused on the grander scheme, utilitarian.
But back to Mass Effect. It’s the same thing with all roads leading to save the world but unlike Dragon Age there is a morality system in place that is not about just a dichotomy between self sacrifice and malicious indulgence. Instead it’s about what is OK to do to save the world? What sacrifices are reasonable? What risks should you take for others? What approach do you take to solve conflict? Renegade (as the ‘evil’ approach is called) options allow you to pistol whip people that want you to follow rules and decorum while the Galaxy hangs in the balance. It allows you to order people to die for the greater good. It’s about using the power you have to take the shortest and most direct route to ultimate salvation. To not pussy foot around trying to appease everyone.
And really that’s the only way to make morality work in a story driven game imo. If the same story is to be told with moral decisions left to the player than they need to be ultimately inconsequential to how the game and story plays out. At best they give slight variations to story beats but nothing really changes from a good playthrough to an evil one in the grand scheme. If it works and feels satisfying is largely down to the developers accepting this and instead focus on smaller nuances like Mass Effect or leaving it ambiguous and up to the player to craft their narrative for the why and motivations like Dragon Age.
What I’d instead would like to see is a game where you play out an evil narrative. And I do know of one such RPG, Tyranny, but I haven’t gotten around to play it yet.
The best example perhaps of melding good and evil in the same game is Star Wars: The Old Republic (the MMORPG). Because you can play it from the evil side as a good character and the good side as an evil character. If you play it through multiple time you can really craft a world and narrative of incredible depth. And I can really recommend playing it as you would any other western RPG and just ignore the MMO side of things. Bear in mind that each individual playthrough suffers from the exact problem you raise in your post, but on the total, the bigger picture, becomes something very interesting and worthwhile.
I feel Mass Effect did at least some of this in terms of allowing you to cut people off and quite a few “shortcuts” of just shooting someone that you can tell from a mile away will be trouble. That game of course has you play someone that obviously can’t have reached the position they have by being a selfish asshole so the premise limits what you can do.
I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.
Eh, I think this strikes the perfect balance where it ensures safety while not stifling innovation. Touchscreens are bad, and the consensus around that is growing. But the solution might not be a return to physical buttons, there are many possibilities and some might turn out easier and safer.
No I’m just against closing doors. This is a great example of the bare minimum being regulated due to safety and it’s regulated to be something tried and tested, like anything safety related should be. While letting the market, i.e. us consumers decide on the other stuff. It’s not the right solution to have politicians decide how a cars auxiliary functions should be operated.
Eugh. That feeling is the worst job related one. When you realize that you could’ve handled it within working hours but because you tried to dodge it you end up having to work overtime and mess up the family plans for the holiday…
Now-a-days I make damn sure someone I know is competent has the task assigned to them with ample time to fail and notify me without it leading to an all-nighter.
Someone who fucked up in one way or another. Anything that’s not a security related incident with a CVE entry is bound to be a major oversight by someone. Remember over promising is a fuck up, not business as usual in a healthy organisation.
The lack of separation between the toes indicating socks stayed on and no grip marks means it could’ve been worse. When you get that irresistible feel that you have to remove all clothing is when you’re in for a life changing experience.
Ah, so he’s not smart enough to understand how a progressive tax system works. At least he’s in good company seeing as that’s the norm if my lunch room discussions at work are any indication.
I think this is the best take really. She obviously lacks the typical qualifications and it’s no doubt that she got the job because of who she knows and not what she knows. But I really dislike when it’s framed like working at hooters and bikini modelling is something bad, shameful or vapid. It’s a job like any other and in this particular scenario it means she has hands on experience dealing with pervs, weirdos and people stuck in a time before women’s suffrage. She might very well be a very effective leader of this bunch…
All three, House, Senate and President, need to agree to the same budget. As Republicans control (on paper) everything but the presidency it’s not like Biden has true agency. If he grandstands on the UNRWA funding here the shutdown that would follow would be squarely on Biden. Thousands of American government employees wouldn’t be paid and people relying on the federal government for aid and support would be out in the cold.
The fact of the matter is that the average American voter care more about the US doing well and everything working than they do about Palestine in general and the UNRWA funding specifically.
You’re being downvoted here because you set the goalpost as “Biden shouldn’t sign this pro-Israel, anti-palestine budget because he’ll lose the election” when that is refuted you then move it to “Biden wants to sign this budget, you’re dumb if you think he’s reluctant”. I don’t think he’s reluctant, but not because he today wants to block aid to UNRWA, because he as a life long career politician knows there’s no such thing as a bill you support 100% if you reach 51% that’s good enough.
Lol wut? Was this guy in a year long coma starting in December 2020? Cyberpunk had one of the top 10 most disastrous launches in gaming history. And in no small part due to botched expectations around quests, mainly because a lot of the pre-release footage was of “The Pickup” which really was the only quest to really deliver all they talked about in those early videos.
Now the game is still a good game. But it’s a great “emergent gameplay” game, one where gameplay and level design work together to create something greater than the sum of the pieces. Quest, plot, story wise it’s not at all anything special in my opinion. It has high production values sure, but the substance is rather meh, and there is little story agency, outside of “The Pickup”, which I think is a large part of the reason they themselves, without announcement, stopped calling it a RPG about a year or so before release.
It’s more you need to prove you have $1 billion for us to put up this $500 million because we don’t trust you to not spend a $500 million collateral on hamberders, hush money and legal fees.
A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare....
Gotta love republicans “the spend and print regime” was bi-partisan and, importantly, initiated under Trump. Further they’ve continuously held control of the Senate while Biden has been in power and the house since 2022.
Finally the Affordable Care Act was a republican bill that Obama compromised on instead of the Democratic proposal, to get some improvements through. It’s always amusing when Republicans now shit all over it…
It’s no secret that America is an increasingly polarized nation. It stands to follow that our places of residence would also be divided. But instead of a donkey and an elephant, the new emblems of each party might as well be an unowned apartment in a big city and a home in the suburbs. Just consider what Aziz Sunderji has...
I think this follows in most nations that the less you have the more likely you are to lean towards the left side of you nations political spectrum. And the more you have the more likely you lean towards the right side. Home ownership is one part of that, a fairly big part given the state of home pricing these days.
Really it’s always been about the class struggle, of the have nots vs the haves, rich vs poor, bourgeois vs proletariat, whatever you want to call it. The US has just done a “better” job of muddying the waters and suffocating organized class warfare.
Mainly by instilling that you’re not really poor because you’re within reach of being a millionaire. The American dream. (Which you need to be asleep to believe in as Carlin put it.).
Though I’m not really holding my breath on people actually waking up to this reality and actually doing something about it. The Circus seems to suffice in the US, and any struggle and violence is directed between marginalized groups. People in declining rural areas “fighting” people from the worst parts of the cities. Middle class suburbians opposing the choices of other middle class suburbians that just want freedom of expression but that somehow limits the first group in ways they can’t even articulate when asked. It’s madness.
It is a great game imo, but it’s also insanely long and pretty grind heavy. I made it through two of the three disc before I sadly lost my save file in a break in.
I later tried again but only made it to disc 2 before just not being able to stomach the grind :/
Donald Trump still hasn’t posted bond in his New York civil fraud trial, but his lawyer Alina Habba wants you to know that it’s definitely not because they’re having trouble getting the massive amount together....
My money is on this stalling being so the Truth Social merger goes through and he can loan against his stake there, that or sell shares. The preliminary valuation puts Trumps part of the post-merger company at up to $4 billion, which is absurd but also he does have an extremely specific demographic completely captured over there. It’s marketing gold for unscrupulous companies and niche stuff that won’t ever sell to city Dems, like truck nuts and tacticool gear.
Adding blockchain tech can do a lot of things here actually.
Reduce amount of ways to be scammed and making trades more straight forward and safe.
Both these are realizable with smart contracts.
Retain ownership even if the game goes offline
While it of course will lose its value you at least have the mementos available. Of course you either need a service to be up that can show you a visual representation or make a backup of the visual data yourself, but for a culturally important game like EVE that is very unlikely to be an issue
As for transaction fees that is not at all necessary for blockchain/crypto. Especially not a centralized one like would be the reasonable approach here. Sure CCP might want a cut, which they could call a transaction fee, but double dipping would be dumb and just make the whole thing fail.
As for currency value being influenced by external actors sure, that is a risk but also an opportunity. The people playing the game has access to make currency just by playing, people outside need to pay to get it. If anything it would make the amount of bots and miner accounts skyrocket, which might be annoying to players.
As for marketplace without blockchain it requires more trust and I’d argue is harder to realize in a secure manner. Blockchain started out as the next evolution in transaction safe databases, that preserves history, and that is exactly what you want for keeping track of in-game items and currency imo. Crypto as most know it is not all that blockchain is or will be. But equally blockchain can’t solve everything like Cryptobros think it can.
Further making their own marketplace might put regulatory crosshairs on them in some markets and also would alienate the large third party marketplaces that are important to the games longevity up until now. Blockchain however could be made to make it easy for them to adapt to the new and make it easier for more sites to pop up and due to the nature of the tech you can build it such that no marketplace operator can easily scam users.
Really I see no issues at all using blockchain tech, and only slight issues with making it a full on, exchange tradeable cryptocurrency, and that’s mainly from follow on effects.
So much dumb shit has been done under the banner of NFT that I want to disagree but yes, if each ID in your blockchain represents a unique variant of an item, and we want to that to persist then yes NFT would fit the bill as a correct term for it.
NFTs don’t need to be limited, they don’t need to have transaction fees to move them, they don’t need to contain a link to an image and masquerade as if you own that image. All they need to do is prove that you have control of it by virtue of it being in your care. Then that proof confers the ability to use the item it represents in game. For currency you naturally wouldn’t use NFTs, though you could if you’re adamant you want a more “cash like” experience with change back and all that jazz.
… I agree it’s great but it’s exactly what is criticized here. It’s the typical bombastic movie epic theme song. It would fit just as well into any Sci-Fi block buster. There is nothing about it that gives away that it’s for a game as opposed to a movie or tv-series.
??? Frogs breed super quick and aren’t that tricky to breed in captivity? I’d even go so far and say that frog meat should be rather sustainable since they eat insects which we can also breed effectively and they in turn can eat refuse from farming. I also haven’t ever seen or heard about the frog being of a particular breed or “wild caught” being part of the allure, nor seen it mentioned in a menu. This whole thing is absurd.
Probably the only type of destruction of art as protest I condone. The piece:
Is not very old or culturally/historically important
Directly depicts someone at the root of this conflict
Was deliberately targeted and the reasons layed out
Trying to destroy unrelated art work is just wasteful of our shared human heritage. Attacking symbols of oppression however is perfectly valid in my opinion and is to me perfectly reasonable escalation when peaceful protests obviously do not bring the changes needed.
I put this on the same level as African Americans attacking statues of confederate generals and other proponents of slavery to hammer home their point.
I wonder if you can make it “green wash” which is forbidden under EU law… Though what I can see the “feature” doesn’t seem available where I’m at. Likely because the risk it will do something illegal is too great.
As I understand it Dreadwolf is like Andromeda in that it’s the same universe but not a continuation of the story, or even tightly related. But I can’t say I’ve followed it too closely. As such there’s no rush to get a Legendary edition out before it. I’d plan it for 2-3 years or so after Dreadwolf to keep the franchise in people’s minds.
It likely starts the LLM it uses as a service, and it requires running on a port. They could of course have rewritten it to not use a port and instead use other mechanisms possible when you’re in control of the code but then that requires modification of the LLM project they use and would make updating its version harder so such a thing would be reserved for the full release or skipped all together because it’s not really a big deal. All this assuming that they do use one of the hundreds of open source local LLM projects floating around Github.
Isn’t this the good thing about open source? You can just fork and revert these changes? That AMD wants to limit your ability to potentially damage your card is completely reasonable, and since they provide the source code for the drivers you should be able to circumvent this and take that risk if you want. This only stops low tech / low skill users that really have no business tuning their card outside of the spec.
Seems like it could be interesting but they way it seemed like he thought the UI spam was the problem with their Open World approach in Assassin’s Creed makes me nervous. I hated that shit from day one. It’s just busy work to add play hours for no real reason. Kinda like filler episodes in Anime or that “welp we’re out of budget so we’ll do a recap episode” that StarGate pulled every season. It’s just a waste of time. What really bothers me though is how that was somehow allowed to become more or less the expectation and definition of an “open world” game. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 were made worse by it, killing pacing and clashing hard with the story. Now I’m not saying there shouldn’t be anything of course but make it fit into the game and story, have bounty contracts that are formulaic to streamline making them but at least have some variation like for one you need to chase them, one they’ve set a trap for you, one their friends come to free them during transport etc. Small things like that keeps it fresh and keeps you on your toes and makes it interesting to see what will happen during this bounty hunt.
No one wants a 20 hour empty game. A 20 hour game needs to be dense, like a good book of equal length. It needs a compelling narrative and interesting immersive gameplay. A 20 hour game can get away with immersion adding limitations to parts of it that an 80 hour game can’t, stuff like not having quick save is annoying in an 80 hour game but perfectly valid in a 20 hour one, same with point of no returns, very grating in 80 hour games but perfectly fine in a 20 hour one.
Also I don’t consider Open World to be a type or genre of MMOs, I’m exclusively talking about Ubisoft style open world games like Assassin’s Creed and games obviously inspired by that open world approach. For MMOs busy work is good because the point really is to socialize and all content is good basically. If the game has co-op then I’m much more lenient on the busy work aspect.
Further I’m also only harping about story less or with very limited story tied to it type events. Like the cop events in Cyberpunk 2077 which is basically an ongoing crime and for whatever reason you have them marked, can go there and kill everybody, get some small reward and a thank you message. But it more or less clashes with the story overall and there’s no point to it. Having enemies to kill and things happening in the world is of course a good thing but drawing player attention to it with an icon and interaction like the thank you message creates expectations about a payoff or it actually being meaningful outside of “clearing the map”. But it’s not. It’s also a fact that crafting all of it takes time, time better spent on making the content that is meaningful even better. Basically give me one 1 hour mission rather than six 10 minute ones.
March 2 (Reuters) - Norway’s King Harald had a temporary pacemaker implanted on Saturday at a hospital in Malaysia after falling ill while on holiday there, the Norwegian royal household said....
Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions (mbin.grits.dev)
Credit to @bontchev
Former Blizzard President Thinks Tipping Game Creators Is Great Idea (80.lv)
By now, everyone in the world knows that American tipping culture is getting out of hand. That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce another way of “supporting” creators. Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, shared his desire to tip developers of especially enjoyable games....
Open world games, need recommendations
Its been a while since I played botw and totk, I want to get into similar open world games with good combat systems, any recommendations?...
Notetaking app that looks too good to be true? - Siyuan
Recently stumbled upon this note-taking app called SiYuan, but it honestly looks a bit too good to be true(?). Has anyone here used it or got any experience with it? Trying to replace Obsidian is a difficult task, and I’ve been through almost all note-taking apps there are out there, however this one looks fairly similar....
Roleplaying evil characters
So, I almost never play evil characters in most CRPGs - despite the potential fun to be had - and recently I’ve been thinking about why....
Sierra Leone declares emergency over drug kush - made from human bones (www.bbc.com)
Sierra Leone’s president has declared a national emergency over rampant drug abuse....
Steam is a ticking time bomb (www.spacebar.news)
Population tipping point could arrive by 2030: global fertility will drop below replacement level years earlier than expected. (www.science.org)
European car safety body is coming for touchscreens. The European New Car Assessment Programme mandates that key controls need physical buttons or switches (www.politico.eu)
Carmakers are equipping their latest models with fancy touchscreens, but that could cause problems with Europe’s largest car safety authority....
The list of senior staff CC'd grows longer (slrpnk.net)
Downward log? (slrpnk.net)
North Texas man changes name to 'Literally Anybody Else,' is now running for president (www.wfaa.com)
From "laddie mag" model to RNC co-chair—the nepo-spouse rise of Lara Trump (www.motherjones.com)
Biden signs $1.2tn spending package as government shutdown is averted (www.theguardian.com)
Package passed Senate late Friday night by vote of 74-24, narrowly averting shutdown and banning Gaza aid through March 2025...
Cyberpunk 2077 quest lead says early access wouldn't work for CDPR the way it did for Larian, and the studio prefers 'to have a banging release where everything is as close to perfection as can be... (www.pcgamer.com)
NY A.G. Says Trump Is Lying to Avoid Paying $464 Million Judgment (newrepublic.com)
Trump has until Monday to come up with the money....
House Republican budget calls for raising the retirement age for Social Security (www.nbcnews.com)
A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare....
The broken housing market is merging with America’s polarized political culture (fortune.com)
It’s no secret that America is an increasingly polarized nation. It stands to follow that our places of residence would also be divided. But instead of a donkey and an elephant, the new emblems of each party might as well be an unowned apartment in a big city and a home in the suburbs. Just consider what Aziz Sunderji has...
Bear Twerk (x0.at)
Remembering Blue Dragon, the spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger that everyone wanted and nobody played (www.vg247.com)
It Seems Trump Still Has No Idea How to Post That Massive Fraud Bond (newrepublic.com)
Donald Trump still hasn’t posted bond in his New York civil fraud trial, but his lawyer Alina Habba wants you to know that it’s definitely not because they’re having trouble getting the massive amount together....
CCP reveals first details of survival game set on a single shard in the EVE universe, but wait: here comes the blockchain (www.pcgamer.com)
Putin says Donald Trump discussed presidential election with him (www.newsweek.com)
Final Fantasy music legend Nobuo Uematsu thinks modern ‘movie-like’ game music is uninteresting | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Legendary video game music composer Nobuo Uematsu says he doesn’t think some modern video game soundtracks are as interesting as those in older games.
France’s appetite for frogs’ legs is endangering species in Asia, say campaigners (www.theguardian.com)
Scientists and vets are urging the president to afford the world’s most traded species better protections...
9 dead, 78 others hospitalized after eating sea turtle meat on Zanzibar’s Pemba Island (www.nbcnews.com)
Historic Portrait of Lord Balfour Slashed by Pro-Palestine Protestors (news.artnet.com)
A painting of Lord Balfour housed at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College was slashed by protest group Palestine Action....
Amazon "search through reviews" is blindly just running an AI model now (lemmy.world)
source...
Man charged with Harvest murder worked in Sen. Tom Butler’s campaign office (whnt.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/12927607...
Let it rip (files.catbox.moe)
Best time to remake a video game? Between 10 and 20 years later (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Mass grave with 1,000 skeletons found in Germany (www.cnn.com)
A Small Steam Game Shows How LLMs Could Kill the Dialogue Tree (re: Verbal Verdict demo) (www.404media.co)
Excerpts:...
AMD continues to lock down AMDGPU features (www.phoronix.com)
Well, apparently, after just a few years the ability to control GPU operation in Linux will slide down considerably.
Star Wars Outlaws – Everything We Know About the Open-world Game (www.ign.com)
Norway's king has pacemaker implanted in Malaysia after falling ill on holiday (www.reuters.com)
March 2 (Reuters) - Norway’s King Harald had a temporary pacemaker implanted on Saturday at a hospital in Malaysia after falling ill while on holiday there, the Norwegian royal household said....